Founded in 1889, the American Dialect Society “is dedicated to the study of the English language in North America, and of other languages, or dialects of other languages, influencing it or influenced by it.”
A century later, the non-profit decided that one of the ways it could do this was by creating an award for the Word of the Year. The members—including academics, teachers, writers, students, and dilettantes—voted “bushlips” as the inaugural 1990 winner.
The term is defined as insincere political rhetoric and was inspired by the former United States president George H.W. Bush, who once said, “Read my lips, no new taxes,” and then broke his promise.
Charles E. Carson is the current managing editor of the American Dialect Society’s quarterly journal, American Speech. He joined the organization in 1991 and compared words-of-the-year votes in those early years to an “intellectual drinking game,” where 30 or so society members would totter back into a conference room from their cocktail hour to shout their opinions.
But a lot has changed since then. During the following decades, the English linguistics industry noticed the fun they were having and got on board in its own way.
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Depending on which dictionary you open up today, the chosen “word of the year” is either Merriam-Webster’s “slop,” Collins’s “vibe coding,” “parasocial” from Cambridge Dictionaries, or their Oxford University Press rival’s “rage bait.”
“There’s dozens now,” Jonathon Green, an author and lexicographer who specializes in the evolution of slang, told the Guardian. “It seems to me that if you have anything to do with publishing a reference book, or certainly a dictionary of some sort, you are duty-bound to come out with one of these things.”
Even though the contests still claim they are meant to “capture pivotal moments in language and culture”—a quote from Dictionary.com, whose 2025 Word of the Year “67” isn’t even a word—the scene has become a shell of its former self, reminiscent of music awards, where hype and headlines appear to matter as much, if not more than, the selections.
The notion that the trend has become just an attempt to generate buzz online is supported by data analysis from the Guardian, which measured the frequency of usage for words of the year chosen by Cambridge, Collins, and Oxford since 2010. More than a third of chosen words are either internet slang terms or owe their meanings to technological devices. The figure rises to two-thirds for words of the year from 2021.
A pretty narrow take on “culture.”
“It’s marketing”, Green said. “Whether it works, I mean, that’s another side of it … [but] is it really something that the public feel ‘this sums up the year I have just lived’?”
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